You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
IT will be recalled that Freud used this term to denote any account of mental processes that comprised a description of them from a dynamic, topographical, and economic point of view; he had first used the word in 1896.1 When Freud wrote his important metapsychological essays in the spring of 19152 he felt he had completed his life work, and that any further contributions he might make would be of a subordinate and merely complementary order. His followers would doubtless have taken a similar view at that time. Had his work come to an end then we should have possessed a well-rounded account of psycho-analysis in what might be called its classical form, and it would not have been easy to predict its future development at the hands of his successors. There was not the slightest reason to expect that in another few years Freud would have produced some revolutionary conceptions which necessarily had the effect of extensively re-modelling both the theory and the practice of psycho-analysis.
For the succeeding three or four darkest years of the war Freud's mind was relatively fallow; the miserable day-to-day life was a full occupation. The new ideas appeared in 1919-21. There were two main themes, and the essence of them may be stated thus: the importance of a biological tendency in the organism to restore earlier states of being, and the threefold differentiation of mental processes. Reflection on the non-libidinal components of the ego serves as a link between the two. The former, which preceded the other in time, was of an avowedly speculative nature, the latter more directly based on clinical investigation. These ideas have not only their scientific value; they are of special interest also to the study of Freud's personality.
The circumstances in which Freud wrote his fascinating Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1919-20 have been mentioned earlier.3 It is